their Parliament, meetings, associa- Mr. Murdstone and his sister, Boun tions, public ceremonies, have learned derby, Gradgrind: we can find them the oratorical phraseology, the abstract in all his novels. Some are so by terms, the style of political economy, education, others by nature; but all of the newspaper and the prospectus. are odious, for they all rail at and de grasp, like a stubborn fact, as it was-all helped emphasis. Pecksniff talks like a prospectus. He possesses its obscurity, its wordiness, and its emphasis. He seems to soar above the earth, in the region of pure ideas, in the bosom of truth. He resembles an apostle, brought up in the Times office. He spouts general ideas on every occasion. He finds a moral lesson ir. the ham and eggs he has just eaten. As he folds his napkin, he rises to lofty contemplations: "Even the worldly goods of which we have just disposed, even they have their moral. See how they come and go. Every pleasure is transitory." * "The process of digestion, as I have been informed by anatomical friends, is one of the most wonderful works of nature. I do not know how it may be with others, but it is a great satisfaction to me to know, when regaling on my humble fare, that I am putting in motion the most beautiful machinery with which we have any acquaintance. I really feel at such times as if I was doing a public service. When I have wound myself up, if I may employ such a term,' said Mr. Pecksniff with exquisite tenderness, 'and know that I am Going, I feel that in the lesson afforded by the works within me, I am a Benefactor to my Kind!'" t We recognize a new species species of hypocrisy. Vices, like virtues, change in every age. The practical, as well as the moral spirit, is English; by commerce, labor, and government, this people has acquired the taste and talent for business; this is why they regard the French as children and madmen. The excess of this disposition is the destruction of imagination and sensibility. Man becomes a speculative machine, in which figures and facts are set in array; he denies the life of the mind, and the joys of the heart; he sees in the world nothing but loss and gain; he becomes hard, harsh, geedy, and avaricious; he treats men as machinery; on a certain day he finds himself simply a merchant, banker, statistician; he has ceased to be a man. Dickens has multiplied portraits of the positive man-Ralph Nickleby, Scrooge, Anthony Chuzzlevit, Jonas Chuzzlewit, Alderınan Cute, * Martin Chuzzlewit, ch. ii. ↑ Ibid. ch. viii. stroy kindness, sympathy, compassion, disinterested affections, religious emotions, a fanciful enthusiasm, all that is lovely in man. They They oppress children. strike women, starve the poor, insult the wretched. The best are machines of polished steel, methodically per forming their ficial duties, and not knowing that they make others suffer. These kinds of men are not found in France. Their rigidity is not in the French character. They The are produced in England by a school which has its philosophy, its great men, its glory, and which has never been established amongst the French. More than once, it is true, French writers have depicted avaricious men, men of business, and shopkeepers: Balzac is full of them; but he explains them by their imbecility, or makes them monsters, like Grandet and Gobseck. Those of Dickens constitute a real class, and represent a national vice. Read this passage of Hard Times, and see if, body and soul, Mr. Gradgrind is not wholly English: ""Now what I want is Facts. Teach these boys and girls nothing but Facts. Facts alone are wanted in life. Plant nothing else, and root out everything else. You can only form the minds of reasoning animals upon Facts; noth ng else will ever be of any service to them, This is the principle on which I bring up my own children, and this is the principle on which I bring up these children. Stick to Facts, sir!' "The scene was a plain, bare, monotonous vault of a schoolroom, and the speaker's square forefinger emphasised his observations by underscoring every sentence with a line on the schoolmaster's sleeve. The emphasis was helped by the speaker's square wall of a fore which had eyebrows for its base, while his eyes found commodious cellarag in two dark caves, overshadowed by the wall. The emphasis was helped by the speaker's mouth, which was wide, thin, and hard set. The emphasis was helped by the speaker's voice, which was inflexible, dry and dictatorial. The emphasis was helped by the speaker's hair, which bristled on the skirts of his bald head, a plantation of firs to keep the wind from its shining surface, all covered with knobs, like the crust of a plum-pie, as if the head had scarcely warehouse-room for the hard facts stored inside. The speaker's obstinate car riage, square coat, square legs, square shoulders-nay, his very neckcloth, trained to take him by the throat with an unaccommodating ""In this life we want nothing but Facts, sir; r; nothing but Facts!' "The speaker, and the schoolmaster, and the third grown person present, all backed a little, and swept with their eyes the inclined plane of little vessels then and there arranged in order, ready to have imperial gallons of facts poured into them until they were full to the brim.* ""THOMAS GRADGRIND, sir! A man of real rties. A man of facts and calculations. A man whe proceeds upon the principle that two and two are four, and nothing over, and who is not to be talked into allowing for anything over. Thomas Gadgrind, sir-peremptorily Thomas-Thomas Gradgrind. With a rule and a pair of scales, and the multiplication table always in his pocket, sir, ready to weigh and measure any parcel of human nature, and tell you exactly what it comes to. It is a mere question of figures, a case of simple arithmetic. You might hope to get some other nonsensical belief into the head of George Gradgrind, or Augustus Gradgrind, or John Gradgrind, or Joseph Gradgrind (all supposititious, non-existent persons), but into the head of Thomas Gradgrind-no, sir!' "In such terms Mr. Gradgrind always mentally introduced himself, whether to his private circle of acquaintance, or to the public in eral. In such terms, no doubt, substituting the words 'boys and girls' for 'sir, Thomas Gradgrind now presented Thomas Gradgrind to the little pitchers before him, who were to be filled so full of facts." ↑ is the portrait of a London merchant Mr. Dombey. In France people do not look fo types among the merchants, but they are found among that class in England, as forcible as in the proudest châteaux Mr. Dombey loves his house as if he were a nobleman, as much as himself If he neglects his daughter and longs for a son, it is to perpetuate the old name of his bank. He has his ances tors in commerce, and he likes to have his descendants in the same branch of business. He maintains traditicas, and continues a power. At this height of opulence, and with this scope of action, he is a prince, and with a prince's position he has his feelings. We see there a character which could only be produced in a country whose commerce embraces the globe, where merchants are potentates, where a company of merchants has trafficked in continents, maintained wars, destroyed kingdoms, founded an empire of a hun dred million men. The pride of such a man is not petty, but terrible; it is so calm and high, that to find a parallel we must read again the Mémoires of the Duke of Saint Simon. Mr. Dombey has always commanded, and it does not enter his mind that he could yield to any one or any thing. He receives flattery as a tribute to which he has a right, and sees men beneath him, at a vast distance, as beings made to beseech and obey him. His second wife, proud Ecith Skewton, resists and scorns him; the pride of the merchant is pitted against the pride of the higli-born woman, and the restrained outbursts of this growing opposition reveal an intensity of passion, which souls thus born and bred alone can feel. Edith, to avenge herself, flees on the anniver sary of her marriage, and gives her Another fault arising from the habit of commanding and striving is pride. It abounds in an aristocratic country, and no one has more soundly rated aristocracy than Dickens; all his portraits are sarcasms. James Harthouse, a dandy disgusted with every thing, chiefly with himself, and rightly so; Lord Frederick Verisopht, a poor duped idiot, brutalized with drink, whose wit consists in staring at men and sucking his cane; Lord Feenix, a sort of mechanism of parliamentary phrases, out of order, and hardly able to finish the ridiculous periods into which he always takes care to lapse; Mrs. Skewton, a hideous old ruin, a coquette to the last, demanding rose-colored self the appearance of being an adult curtains for her death-bed, and parading her daughter through all the drawing-rooms of England in order to sell her to some vain husband; Sir John Chester, a wretch of high society, who, for fear of compromising himself, refuses to save his natural son, and refuses it with all kinds of airs, as he finishes his chocolate. But the most English picture of the aristocratic spirit * Hard Times, book i. ch. i. Ibid. ch. ii. eress. It is then that his inflexible pride asserts itself in all its rigidity. He has driven out of the house his daughter, whom he believes the accomplice of his wife; he forbids the one or the other to be recalled to his memory; he commands his sister and his friends to be silent; he re ceives guests with the same tone and the same coldness. With despair in his heart, and feeling bitterly the in as sult offered to him by his wire, wife, the conscientiousness of his failure, and the idea of public ridicule, he remains firm, as haughty, as calm as ever. He launches out more recklessly in speculations, and is ruined; he is on the point of suicide. Hitherto all was well: the bronze column continued whole and unbroken; but the exigencies of public morality mar the idea of the book. His daughter arrives in the nick of time. She entreats him; his feelings get the better of him, she carries him off; he becomes the best of fathers, and spoils a fine novel. III. Let us look at some different personages. In contrast with these bad and factitious characters, produced by national institutions, we find good creatures such as nature made them; and first, children. have played all day on the lawn. The fire-side by which they will pass the evening is a sanctuary, and domestic tenderness is the only poetry they need. A child deprived of these affections and this happiness seems to be de prived of the air we breathe, and the novelist does not find a volume too much to explain its unhappiness. Dickens has recorded it in ten volumes, and at last he has written the history of David Copperfield. David is loved by his mother, and by an honest servant girl, Peggotty; he plays with her in the garden; he watches her sew; he reads to her the natural history of crocodiles; he fears the hens and geese, which strut in a menacing and ferocious manner in the yard; he is perfectly happy. His mother marries again, and all changes. The father-in-law Mr. Murdstone, and his sister Jane, are harsh, methodical, cold beings. Poor little David is every moment wounded by harsh words. He dare not speak or move; he is afraid to kiss his mother; he feels himself weighed down, as by a leaden cloak, by the cold looks of the new master and mistress. He falls back on himself; mechanically studies the lessons assigned him; cannot learn them so great is his dread of not knowing them. He is whipped, shut up with bread and water in a lonely room. He is terrified by night, and fears himself. He asks himself whether in fact he is not bad or wicked, and weeps. This incessant terror, hopeless and issueless, the spectacle of this wounded sensibility and stupefied intelligence, the long anxieties' the sleepless nights, the solitude of the poor imprisoned child, his passionate desire to kiss his mother or to weep on the breast of his nurse, all this is sad to see. These children's griefs are as heart-felt as the sorrows of a man. It is the history of a frail plant, which was flourishing in a warm air, beneatn a mild sun, and which, suddenly transplanted to the snow, sheds its leaves and withers. We have none in French literature. Racine's little Joas could only exist in a piece composed for the ladies' college of Saint Cyr; the little child speaks like a prince's son, with noble and acquired phrases, as if repeating his catechism. Nowadays these portraits are only seen in France in Newyear's books, written as models for good children. Dickens painted his with special gratification; he did not think of edifying the public, and he has charmed it. All his children are of extreme sensibility; they love much, and they crave to be loved. To understand this gratification of the painter, and this choice of characters, we must think of their physical type. English children have a color so fresh, a complexion so delicate, a skin so transparent, eyes so blue and pure, that they are like beautiful flowers. No wonder if a novelist loves them, lends to their soul a sensibility and innocence which shine forth from their looks, if he thinks that these frail and charming roses are crushed by the coarse hands which try to bend them. We must also imagine to ourselves the households in which they grow up. When at five o'clock the merchant and the clerk leave their office and their business, they return as quickly as possible to the pretty cottage, where their children | Sue have given us more than one ex The working-classes are like children, dependent, not very cultivated, akin to nature, and liable to oppression. And so Dickens extols them. That is not new in France; the novels of Eugène ample, and the theme is as old as Rous- | on humble wretchedness; the smallest seau; but in the hands of the English writer it has acquired a singular force. His heroes possess feelings so delicate, and are so self-sacrificing, that we cannot admire them sufficiently. They have nothing vulgar but their pronunciation; the rest is but nobility and generosity. We see a mountebank abandon his daughter, his only joy, for fear of injuring her in any way. A young woman devotes herself to save the unworthy wife of a man who loves her, and whom she loves; the man dies; she continues, from pure self-sacrifice, to care for the degraded creature. A poor wagoner, who thinks his wife unfaithful, loudly pronounces her innocent, and all his vengeance is to think only of loading her with tenderness and kindness. None, according to Dickens, feel so strongly as they do the happiness of loving and being lovedthe pure joys of domestic life. None have so much compassion for those poor deformed and infirm creatures whom they so often bring into the world, and who seem only born to die. None have a juster and more inflexible moral sense. I confess even that Dickens' heroes unfortunately resemble the indignant fathers of French melodramas. When old Peggotty learns that his niece is seduced, he sets off, stick in hand, and walks over France, Germany, and Italy, to find her and bring her back to duty. But above all, they have an English sentiment, which fails in Frenchmen: they are Christians. It is not only women, as in France, who take refuge in the idea of another world; men turn also their thoughts towards it. In England, where there are so many sects, and every one chooses his own, each one believes in the religion he has made for himself; ar. this noble sentiment raises still higner the throne upon which the uprightness of their resolution and the delicacy of their heart has placed them. In reality, the novels of Dickens can all be reduced to one phrase, to wit: Be good, and love: there is genuine joy only in the emotions of the heart; and most despised being may in him self be worth as much as thousands of the powerful and the proud. Take care not to bruise the delicate souls which flourish in all conditions, under all costumes, in all ages. Believe that humanity, pity, forgiveness, are the finest things in man; believe that in timacy, expansion, tenderness, tears. are the sweetest things in the world To live is nothing; to be powerful learned, illustrious, is little; to be use ful is not enough. He alone has lived and is a man who has wept at the remembrance of a kind action which he himself has performed or received. IV. We do not believe that this contrast between the weak and the strong, or this outcry against society in favor of nature, are the caprice of an artist or the chance of the moment. When we penetrate deeply into the history of English genius, we find that its primitive foundation was impassioned sensibility, and that its natural expression was lyrical exaltation. Both were brought from Germany, and make up the literature existing before the Conquest. After an interval you find them again in the sixteenth century, when the French literature, introduced from Normandy, had passed away: they are the very soul of the nation. But the education of this soul was opposite to its genius; its history contradicted its nature; and its primitive inclination has clashed with all the great events which it has created or suffered. The chance of a victorious invasion and an imposed aristocracy, whilst establishing the enjoyment of political liberty, has impressed on the character habits of strife and pride. The chance of an insular position, the necessity of com merce, the abundant possession of the first materials for industry, have de veloped the practical faculties and the positive mind. The acquisition of these habits, faculties, and mind, to which must be added former hostile feelings to Rome, and an inveterate hatred sensibility is the whole man. Leave against an oppressive church, has given science to the wise, pride to the nobles, birth to a proud and reasoning religion, 'uxury to the rich; have compassion | replacing submission by independence select in order to grasp the whole, and confine himself to a few in order to embrace all. In this crowd two men have ap peared of superior talent, original and contrasted, popular on the same grounds, ministers to the same cause moralists in comedy and drama, de fenders of natural sentiments against social institutions; who by the pre cision of their pictures, the depth of their observations, the succession and bitterness of their attacks, have renewed, with other views and in another style, the old combative spirit of Swift and Fielding. poetic theology by practical morality, ❘ up a career to the precise and moral and faith by discussion. Politics, mind. The critic thus is, as it were, business, and religion, like three pow- swamped in this copiousness; he must erful machines, have created a new man above the old. Stern dignity, self-command, the need of authority, severity in its exercise, strict morality, without compromise or pity, a taste for figures and dry calculation, a dislike of facts not palpable and ideas not useful, ignorance of the invisible world, scorn of the weaknesses and tendernesses of the heart, such are the dispositions which the stream of facts and the ascendency of institutions tend to confirm in their souls. But poetry and domestic life prove that they have only half succeeded. The old sensibility, oppressed and perverted, still lives and works. The poet subsists under the Puritan, the trader, the statesman. The social man has not destroyed the natural man. This frozen crust, this unsociable pride, this rigid attitude, often cover a good and tender nature. It is the English mask of a German head; and when a talented writer, often a writer of genius, reaches the sensibility which is bruised or buried by education and national institutions, he moves his reader in the most inner depths, and becomes the master of all hearts. CHAPTER II. One, more ardent, more expansive, wholly given up to rapture, an impassioned painter of crude and dazzling pictures, a lyric prose-writer, omnipotent in laughter and tears, plunged into fantastic invention, painful sensibility, vehement buffoonery; and by the boldness of his style, the excess of his emotions, the grotesque familiarity of his caricatures, he has displayed all the forces and weaknesses of an artist, all the audacities, all the successes, and all the oddities of the imagination. The other, more contained, better informed and stronger, a lover of moral dissertations, a counsellor of the public, a sort of lay preacher, less bent on defending the poor, more bent on censuring man, has brought to the aid of satire a sustained common sense, a The Hobel continued-Thackeray. great knowledge of the heart, consum I. THE novel of manners in England multiplies, and for this there are several reasons: first, it is born there, and every plant thrives well in its own soil; secondly, it is a natural outlet: there is no music in England as in Germany, or conversation as in France; and men who must think and feel find in it a means of feeling and thinking. On the other hand, women take part in it with eagerness; amidst the stagnation of gallantry and the coldness of religion, it gives scope for imagination and dreams. Finally, by its minute details and practical counsels, it opens mate cleverness, powerful reasoning, a treasure of meditated hatred, and has persecuted vice with all the weapons of reflection. By this contrast the one completes the other; and we may form an exact idea of English taste, by plac ing the portrait of William Makepeace Thackeray by the side of that of Charles Dickens. § 1.-THE SATIRIST. II. No wonder if in England a novelist writes satires. A gloomy and redec tive man is impelled to it by his char acter; he is still further impelled by the surrounding mai.ners. He is not |
